Property

October 19, 2008

On October 19, Chinese authorities released the full text
of the Communist Party Central Committee's decision on rural reform. The decision calls for expanding the ability
of Chinese farmers to transfer, lease, rent, or exchange their land-use rights,
consistent with the predictions of earlier news reports.

Strengthening Party leadership over rural work.The decision emphasizes that local Party
committees are to continue play the core role in guiding rural affairs.

Addressing the rural-urban divide. The decision calls on officials to progressively work toward ensuring that migrant workers enjoy the same rights to education, health services, and other public services that established urban residents do.

Improving rural governance. The decision calls on officials to steadily work to ensure equal per-person representation between rural and urban districts in local legislatures.

The plan proposes a number of steps aimed at improving intellectual property protection in China, including enforcement campaigns, legislative reform, popular education activities, and increased international exchanges.

March 19, 2007

On March 16, the Chinese National People's Congress passed the P.R.C. Property Law. The full text of the law is available on the P.R.C. government website, and commentary and analysis is available from Xinhua.

The above Xinhua link has gone dead (as of April 1), but it and the pages to which it refers are still available through the Google cache.

An English translation of the Property Law is available from Lehman, Lee, and Xu.

January 20, 2007

China's draft Property Law is moving towards consideration and adoption by the National's People's Congress (NPC) at the legislative session which begins on March 5, 2007, according to a January 20 Xinhua article. The draft law has gone through an unprecedented seven readings by the NPC since first being introduced in 2002. For a timeline of the bill, provided by the official Chinese Xinhua news agency, see here.

The draft Property law has stirred significant opposition among both Chinese politicians and academics concerned about the ideological implications of legal protections for private property. In 2006, NPC consideration of the draft law was delayed after a Beijing law professor attacked the bill in a open letter published on the Internet, as noted in a March 10, 2006 Financial Times article. His assertion that the bill failed to protect state property and undermined the socialist system gathered (or reflected) sufficient attention from central authorities to delay it's consideration until this year.

Subsequent amendments to the draft law made in 2006 appear aimed at responding to some of these concerns, adding clauses providing for the equal protection of state and private property.